Yggdrasil · Gods and Their Allies
Fólkvangr
Freyja’s hall, where she receives half of the fallen.
In Thorpe’s translation
14. Fôlkvang is the ninth, there Freyia directs the sittings in the hall. She half the fallen chooses each day, but Odin th' other half.
- Benjamin Thorpe (translator), The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (the Poetic Edda) (opens in a new tab) (19th c.; Norroena ed. 1906), Grímnismál, stanza 14 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ) Rights: Public domain. Nineteenth-century translation, in the public domain. Text as published online by Project Gutenberg (ebook #14726).
What the sources say
Grímnismál says Fólkvangr is where Freyja directs the sittings in the hall, and that she chooses half of the fallen each day while Odin has the other half. Gylfaginning says her dwelling in heaven is called Fólkvangr, and that to whatever battlefield she rides she claims half of the slain.
- Grímnismál (Poetic Edda), stanza 14 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ)
- attributed to Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning (13th century), the passage on Freyja
Names and background
The name means "field of the host", also given as "army-field" or "people-field". Rudolf Simek thinks it is probably not much older than Grímnismál, the poem where it first appears. How to read it is debated. John Lindow takes the first part as "army", which makes the place an alternative to Valhalla for the war-slain. Britt-Mari Näsström asks why two halls for warriors exist and suggests they may reflect different initiation traditions, one of Odin and one of Freyja.
Simek notes that Gylfaginning puts Freyja's hall Sessrúmnir inside Fólkvangr, a link that Grímnismál does not make. Hilda Ellis Davidson observes that what such halls meant has largely been lost.
Other medieval texts give hints, though not about Fólkvangr by name. In Egils saga a daughter of Egill vows to starve herself to join Freyja, and in Hervarar saga a queen hangs herself in the Hall of the Dís; Britt-Mari Näsström reads both as signs that Freyja also received women. These are saga texts, not objects or inscriptions, and the readings are hers.
- Wikipedia contributors, Fólkvangr (opens in a new tab)
Where the sources attest it
Fólkvangr is named in Grímnismál, stanza 14 in Thorpe’s numbering, where Freyja there chooses half of the slain each day and Odin has the other half. Snorri repeats this in Gylfaginning, saying Freyja rules Fólkvangr and receives half of the slain. Both sources give only this one function; no description of the place itself survives in them.
Snorri’s Prose Edda survives in several medieval manuscripts, chiefly Codex Regius, Codex Wormianus and the Uppsala manuscript, so the Gylfaginning accounts rest on those copies rather than on a single text.
- Benjamin Thorpe (translator), The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (the Poetic Edda) (opens in a new tab) (19th c.; Norroena ed. 1906) Rights: Public domain. Nineteenth-century translation, in the public domain. Text as published online by Project Gutenberg (ebook #14726).
- Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Prose Edda (Brodeur translation) (opens in a new tab) (1916) Rights: Public domain. Chapter numbers follow this edition.
Later reception
In the early 20th century, Karl Ernst Osthaus used "Folkwang" for his idea of reconciling art and life. It named the Museum Folkwang in Essen (1902) and the Folkwang University of the Arts.